Tuesday, August 20, 2013

I pity the poor emigrant

Like Bob Dylan, I pity the poor emigrant. Especially when
the poor emigrant is me – although poor is not the precise word. Poor conjures
up the guy who struggles up from the hold, where half of his fellow travelers
have died of the potato famine, who is thrown by some savage matelot into the
line to be processed by a customs official on Ellis Island, a creep with
leering eyes who changeshis name and
gives him an official paper proclaiming him eligible for exploitation by his
Darwinianbetters and has him and his four
cardboard suitcases kicked out into the street, where he picks himself up and
finds a job as a stringman in a windowshade factory for ten cents an hour, 26
hours a day. As we know, in just one hundred twenty years, such is the miracle
of America, his great great grandchildren have risen to have degrees, hundreds
of thousands of dollars in student debt, and great jobs as salesmen at designer
pillow boutiques, or slinging escargot, for hedgefund geniuses, 26 hours a day,
in some of our finest restaurants, and using their disposable income to
gentrify selected streets in Astoria.

Such is not my plight, however. Emigrating to Los Angeles
has its own meatgrinder aspect. One of them is the omnipresence of cars. I was
prepared, or so I thought, for this. My life has not be a car-crossed one – the
last time I owned a vehicle, an unfortunate AMC matador that bit me in the ass
and died of a broken block, was more than twenty years ago. And before my
tragic tete a tete with the Matador, I sufficed largely by driving borrowed
vehicles, when I had to, and using my legs (walking, biking) to crawl across my
environs at all other times. It worked! It even worked in Paris, where there is
certainly a crazy car culture but where things tend to cuddle together, houses,
apartments, stores, theaters and cafes, so that you can pretty much get to them
in five minutes at a leisurely gait.

We have put all our money down on a place in Santa Monica,
and are now planning our next big play: a car. So far, Hertz, an awful rental
company, has been providing us our car, something called a Senta. I’ve read
that the new generation, the generation that is so happily serving our
financial elite in its off hours, has grown disaffected with the car.I of course am older than the ancient
mariner, so I remember when the names of different kinds of cars were known to my
schoolmates, and could even be recognized at a distance. This is something I
have never been good at. What others see as, for instance, an Acura or a Golf
or some similarly ridiculous monikor, will appear to me as the small gray car
or the larger blue car or whatever color the car happens to be. I only remember
the car type I bought back in the day because it was such a pain in the ass.
This Senta is a pain in the ass, too – this is one of the literal problems of
driving aimlessly all over Los Angeles in search of the basics. This is what
emigrants do – we search for the basics. Grocery stores, mattress stores, baby
furniture shops, coffee places with wifi, etc. etc. The emigrant spends his
first weeks not, as he imagined, lolling in the sun on the beach, but in a
prolonged state of sticker shock among the big ticket items that are supposed
to form the context of his domestic world.

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.